BARRIE'S STORY - An acoustic Neuroma patient

19. EYE PROBLEMS

By July 2003 I was making progress with my facial palsy with some light exercises to try and improve facial muscle tone. I was getting to the point that I felt I would make little further progress to my balance, walking and handwriting until my eye had been opened. My consultant therefore wrote a letter to my ophthalmic surgeon requesting he should review my eye with the possibility that it should be opened. The ophthalmic surgeon did some tests on my eye establishing that I could not feel something pushed into my eye and my top eyelid did not seem to be operating. He therefore passed me onto another ophthalmic surgeon who was more experienced in dealing with such eye problems. The plan that developed was to open my eye and place a small gold weight in my eyelid to make it droop and protect my eye helping it to blink. There seems to be a number of potential problems with this procedure. For example the weight can cause the eye to be permanently open when lying down and the body can reject the gold weight. After some thought I have decided to go ahead and a date has been set to complete the first stage which is to remove the tarsorrhaphy.